The Unbroken

by C. L. Clark

  Pruett blinked hard and pressed her lips together. After an eternity of a breath, she pulled Touraine close. Her neck smelled like gun powder, oil, sweat.

  “You smell like a fucking rosebush.” Pruett held Touraine at arm’s length, nose wrinkled.

  “How is Rogan?” Touraine blurted. Her fear found its exit.

  “Don’t worry. I’ve held him off so far. Seems he’s not that particular about who he chases, as long as she’s in power and he can try to make her small.”

  Pruett looked her up and down, asking without asking, How are you?

  “I’m fine.”

  “Figured you were.” Pruett held out the broadside. It had been balled up at least once.

  Touraine eased out the wrinkles. Her stomach lurched, and she couldn’t tell if it was embarrassment or dread. “Sky-falling fuck.”

  “That supposed to be you and her?” Pruett asked. “They fucked up your face.”

  “Where’d you get this? How many were there?”

  Pruett raised an eyebrow and crossed her arms back over her chest. “They’re all over the city by now, most likely. I pulled this one off the wall of a smoking house around the corner.”

  “Shit. I need to go.”

  “I just got back.” Pruett frowned. “Can’t you give me a minute of your time, or what? Were you even going to bother seeing me?”

  Touraine’s heart thumped low in her stomach, making her nauseated. She could stay. Luca had given her leave. But even though she didn’t know the full shape of Luca’s plans, she knew that Luca needed to see this. It was the kind of picture that did damage, no matter what your plans were. Touraine tried and failed to ignore the bitterness and hurt on Pruett’s face.

  “I’m sorry, Pru. I have to go. She’s going to kill someone.”

  She picked up an armful of books, plucking them almost at random. If it looked like a Shālan history, she took it. Luca would probably be interested. She tucked the broadside inside one of the covers. With one last look at her friends, she turned to go.

  Captain Horse-Fucking Rogan stood in the railed corridor, his slicked hair even shinier in the sunlight.

  “I hadn’t expected the pleasure of Her Royal Highness’s chambermaid so soon. And trespassing, no less.”

  As always, Pruett was the fastest on her feet. “Captain, sir. The former lieutenant is on an errand for Princess Luca. I was just hurrying her along.”

  “All of you? Quite a lot of help for a simple errand.”

  Aimée shrugged. “Spare key.”

  “Heavy lifting.” Tibeau folded his arms across his thick chest.

  “A spare key?” Rogan raised an eyebrow. “We don’t have a spare key. Do you expect me to believe that you four aren’t plotting something like treason?” His smile turned wicked. “At the very least, do you expect a jury not to believe it?”

  Touraine stood straighter, let her anger fill out the breadth of her shoulders. “There’ll be no jury, Captain. They’re helping me on orders from Her Highness.”

  From her pocket, Touraine pulled out the pass that Luca had stamped with her personal seal.

  “And I’ll need their help to carry these books to Princess Luca’s library in the Quartier.”

  It was a desperate ploy, and Rogan smiled.

  “Unfortunately, they’re all indispensable at the moment. You’re more than welcome to come back, however. Or better yet, Her Highness can send some of the blackcoats. We’d be happy to oblige her.”

  Touraine looked over her shoulder at Tibeau, Aimée, and Pruett. They were all used to his bullying. It was etched in the weary resignation on their faces. It had always been one of the facts of life as a Sand, but this was personal. The four of them had gone up against Rogan and his friends years before and lost, badly. But Touraine knew how to play the Balladairans’ game to get what her friends needed. Knew whose name to drop, whose boots to lick. It’s why she’d been picked for lieutenant in the first place.

  “Her Highness has a special interest in the well-being of the conscripts, Captain.” Touraine puffed herself as haughtily as she could, and did her best to imitate Luca’s cold demeanor. “And if she or I learn that you’ve been treating the conscripts poorly or with unnecessary severity, she wouldn’t hesitate to remind you of Guard Lanquette’s particular duty.” Touraine cleared her throat. “I believe it was to separate your balls from your body? Something like that.”

  She shoved past him with her arms full of books. The silent rage crossed with embarrassment on his face made it worth it.

  It was the best she could do for now, but somehow Touraine would fix this, if she had to kill Rogan herself.

  Luca was reading through the list of prisoners in the compound jail, when the letters from Balladaire interrupted her. Guérin bowed over the proffered papers, uncharacteristically buoyant. Luca frowned at her uncle’s name on the topmost.

  “Have you received something from home, then?” Luca set the letters on top of the records and ledgers she’d taken from Cheminade’s office. She’d been skimming through the prisoners to see which ones might be worth freeing and which ones might deserve a retrial based on… biased concerns. Luca might be willing to free someone who’d punched a price-gouging merchant, but she wasn’t letting murderers back into the colony.

  Guérin smiled with reserve, which might as well have been a grin on her usually somber face. “Aye, Your Highness. My oldest daughter’s got a ’prenticeship with a carpenter in La Chaise.”

  That warmed Luca’s heart. “I look forward to commissioning a piece from her.”

  At that, Guérin beamed. “She’d be honored, Your Highness, and I don’t reckon you’d regret it.”

  There was a commotion outside the office, and Luca heard Touraine’s voice. She was smiling before the urgency in the other woman’s tone became clear.

  “Your Highness?” Touraine knocked on the door three times, even though it was open. She wouldn’t maintain eye contact with Luca.

  “What have you done?” It came out sharper than Luca intended.

  Touraine ducked her head. “I’m sorry, Your Highness. I found this in the city.”

  The broadside trembled in Touraine’s hand as she held it out, carefully turning the image away from Guérin’s gaze. Luca approached it like a snake. She didn’t want to take it, afraid it might bite. It had been crumpled and straightened and crumpled again, and was damp with Touraine’s sweat. The image, however, was clear.

  Sky above and earth below. This was what she had been afraid of. Even though they had clapped for her, for her decision to help the Qazāli orphans. She wasn’t naive enough to think that everyone approved of the decision, but she hadn’t expected a rebuttal so swift.

  The worst part was the way her cheeks flushed and she couldn’t help it. She understood why Touraine wouldn’t meet her eyes and why she’d hidden it from Guérin.

  The… artist… had drawn the two of them locked in a dancing embrace. Luca, with the same too-severe bun as before, leering at a poor likeness of Touraine—it had gotten only the short military cut of her hair and the broad shoulders right. She was dressed in poor Qazāli clothing, a ragged hooded vest and loose trousers. No one who had seen Luca recently, which was to say, at the ball, could doubt who it was intended to be.

  It was captioned in beautiful calligraphy: “Queen of the Sand Fleas.”

  Luca tore the paper in half, then quarters and eighths and more until they fell to shreds she would have to apologize to Adile for.

  “Find them,” she growled. When neither Guérin nor Touraine left, she shouted, “Go! Send a squad to rip them off the walls and burn them.”

  Luca swore under her breath. “Wait! Touraine.” The soldier stepped back in from the hall outside, eyes lowered and body wary of threat. Luca’s embarrassment was boiling into fury at her impotence. She forced herself to steady her breathing and her tone.

  “Go back to the rebels. Ask them for a list of demands so that I can consider them. These aren’t… officia
l negotiations, but they can be a start.”

  “Your Highness?”

  “What?” snapped Luca. “If you’re suddenly incapable…”

  Touraine flinched. “No, Your Highness. I mean, I will. I’ll find them.”

  “Good.” If Touraine didn’t swear the rebels to secrecy soon, the fledgling talks would never get off the ground.

  CHAPTER 17

  LITTLE TALKS

  Touraine spent the rest of the day looking for the rebels’ location near the Qazāli baker. The only people there when she tramped up the stairs, though, were a small family scared shitless.

  So on the following day, she went back to the beginning, to the shop in the Puddle District where the big man had first tried to pry into soft spots Touraine wouldn’t admit existed. The shop was closed, but the first thing that caught Touraine’s eye was a broadside plastered to the wall. The broadside. Her face went hot, and she tore it off in ragged strips.

  Breathing heavily, she took note of her surroundings. Maybe it was her imagination, but the fish smelled extra rotten today. The Qazāli dockworkers pretended not to pay attention to her, but she caught them looking away from her as soon as she turned toward them.

  She had her knife, though, and the princess’s protection. So she squatted on her haunches in front of the bookshop and waited. And waited. Saïd didn’t come. Nor did any of the other rebels she could recognize.

  Eventually, the sun sloped down, and the noise of the Puddle District grew louder, more raucous. Laborers came off their shifts for meals, for drinking and fucking and fighting. They stopped turning away from her when she looked at them. Touraine thumbed the handle of her new knife and wondered just how far Luca’s protection would take her.

  Not far enough.

  A burly woman who reminded Touraine of the Jackal, only more pleasant, said something to her handful of companions as they casually closed in on her. They were all built like oxen, broad backed, thick in the middle and the thighs from the burden of their days.

  One of the smaller ones, a man with a close beard and twice-broken nose, said, “It’s time you moved along, isn’t it?”

  With the bookshop to her back, Touraine had only so many options, and they were narrowing fast the closer these Qazāli got. Negotiation seemed like the kind of thing that went better the fewer people you killed. At least it wasn’t her fault, she would tell the princess.

  “I’m just leaving.” Touraine held her hands up and sidled to her left, toward the side street.

  “Meant that as a more permanent kind of thing,” the smaller man said.

  He closed that side of their semicircle, blocking Touraine’s escape as they tightened in like a snake. The big woman came at Touraine from the middle, and another two closed in on Touraine’s right. They were close enough for Touraine to see the gaps in their teeth and the grime in their fingernails. They stank like sour sweat and stale smoke.

  Touraine drew her knife. Sky above, she wished she’d had a chance to train with it. It was light in her hand, its balance foreign, but it was sharp so it would do.

  “In the name of Her Royal Highness the princess,” she said, “I’m warning you.”

  They must have thought she was just a pampered show horse, all well-turned muscles and no skill. She saw it in their smirks as they closed in. Then she saw the disbelief in their faces as she struck at the small man. She caught him across the arm, and he screamed as she ran by him.

  Touraine sprinted up the side street, trying to connect it to the way back to the Mile-Long Bridge and El-Wast proper. The laborers splashed and swore as they chased after her.

  Turn here, she thought, no, here—she recognized that smoking den with a bright red curtain of beads over the door—she passed it and hung a hard right. She could see the bridge, its lanterns guiding her way back to the city proper.

  She returned to the Quartier empty handed.

  Touraine refused to be cowed. She went back to Saïd’s shop the next day. This time, everyone watched her as she stood vigil in front of the closed shop. Before things got messy, however, a small child with tousled curls flying in a dark halo strutted right up to her. Their front two teeth were missing as they smiled and held out a small piece of paper.

  The paper had the rough edge of a book’s binding on one side and a jagged torn edge at the top. Rue Tontenac, after sunset.

  Touraine looked at the kid, who stared at her innocently. What a ruse. The kid was just as wary, just as keyed into the mood of the passersby as Touraine was. What a life.

  “Where’s rue Tontenac?” Touraine asked.

  The kid shot off an explanation that was so mixed with Shālan that it was hopeless. “Can you show me?” She mimed with her fingers a person walking. “Take me?”

  A grubby palm shot out, waiting. Fair enough. Touraine fished out a half sovereign and dropped it in the kid’s hand. It vanished. Then the child took off, bare brown feet slapping against the street. Touraine sprinted after.

  Rue Tontenac was in the heart of the Qazāli districts. The buildings were cracked clay brick, and the road, once paved with stone, was now mostly dirt. Most of the traffic seemed to go in and out of a café or smoking den. The whole street smelled like rose smoke and the burnt bean water that Luca liked so much. There wasn’t a single Balladairan. Now Touraine just had to find the right building.

  She turned to the kid, but they were already gone.

  Touraine weighed her options. Thinking about the youth who’d been smoking outside the baker’s oven the other day, she assumed that same casual lean against one of the buildings and glared moodily at nothing, pretending to be lost in her thoughts. It was easiest to go unnoticed if you kept to your own business. She’d learned that the hard way in the Balladairan barracks.

  After an hour of sweating in the midday sun, she noticed one building had so few visitors as to be odd.

  The note said after sunset. That was hours away. She went in anyway.

  The cool darkness almost made Touraine sink to her knees in relief. The narrow entry led to the sun and a courtyard on one side and up a narrow flight of stairs on the other. The ground floor was quiet. She poked her head around the corner just to be sure. The small courtyard was empty. She hiked up the stairs and paused outside the first door she came across.

  Heated voices rose inside.

  “What do you mean you can’t heal her?”

  That was the Jackal, deep and accusatory.

  “You think I’m not trying?” An unfamiliar voice responded, full of pain and frustration. “Shāl is there, the magic is moving, but—nothing is happening in her.”

  Magic. Heal her. Touraine reached unconsciously for the scar on her forearm. She’d just started to believe she’d imagined the cut’s quick healing, convinced herself that the wound was shallower than she’d thought. She suddenly felt nauseated.

  Inside the room, the voices stopped abruptly. Touraine just had time to straighten when the door swung open and she faced the Jackal yet again. This time, her scarf was hastily wrapped around her head and face, leaving thick graying dreadlocks only half-wrapped.

  The woman filled the doorway, and when she caught Touraine trying to glance behind her, she stepped out of the room and closed the door. Then she filled the stairwell instead, backing Touraine onto a lower step.

  “Give me one good reason I shouldn’t strangle you now,” the Jackal growled. Touraine didn’t doubt the woman could manage it, even with one hand.

  Touraine stared her down. “I have a response from the princess.”

  “I said a good reason. Your princess can eat my shit.”

  “That’s not what your friends said.” Touraine nodded at the door. “Will she be all right?”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Are you going to listen, or should I wait and talk to someone who actually gives a shit about making peace?”

  The stairwell was lit only by a window higher up and the open doorway below. The resulting shadow made it almost impossible to see
the Jackal’s eyes at all.

  The older woman snorted and said, “The only real peace’ll come when all of those bastards are gone. If I have my way, these little talks are over.” She took another few steps down the stairs, forcing Touraine back again.

  The Jackal was a familiar type. Dogged and persistent, like her namesake, and she respected only force met with force. She wasn’t like Luca or even like the Apostate, bent on outsmarting people with words. Touraine and the Jackal were similar in that way. They knew there was a time and a place.

  Touraine stepped up a stair. The Jackal didn’t move.

  “I know you don’t really give a shit about me or the other conscripts. I know you’d rather gut me here.”

  “Right on all counts—”

  Touraine stepped up another stair. “I’m glad you framed me for that murder. If not for you, I wouldn’t have my new position.”

  The words were a bluff, but even as something twisted guiltily inside her, Touraine knew it was true. This was a better position than dying on the front lines as a conscript. The fate she’d left to all her friends. She pushed the guilt down deeper.

  “Frame you?” The Jackal chuckled. “That was a coincidence. We couldn’t care less, though if they’d executed you, we might call it justice done.”

  The confession caught Touraine off guard, but she pushed that away, too. She climbed up one more step, putting her in reach of the Jackal’s strength.

  “Then go ahead. Strangle me. Get your justice. You kill me, she loses nothing, but you—you lose the friendship of the one person in all of Balladaire who doesn’t want to kill the rebels outright.” The only person Touraine had ever heard speak of the rebels with something other than disdain. No, Luca and Cheminade. “She’s already given you an act of faith.”

  “Good faith, from the faithless? She doesn’t even have the authority to make deals with us.” The Jackal sneered.

  Faithless. She said it the same way Cantic said “uncivilized.”

  Touraine hitched her chin up. “Even so. Faith is better placed in real people, backed up with real actions. And she’s backed by the duke regent.” Touraine wasn’t totally sure about that particular, but the Jackal didn’t need to know that.